Twenty-seven people were arrested from a call centre in Sector V early on Thursday for allegedly duping people in Germany by posing as representatives of Microsoft and other software majors.
A team from the Salt Lake cyber crime police station raided the call centre that was operating from Ergo Towers in Sector V, near RDB Boulevard, based on a tip-off.
The call centre had space for around 50 people to work simultaneously, a senior officer of the Bidhannagar Commissionerate said. All the employees were engaged in making international calls through VOIP, which makes tracing the calls difficult for law enforcement agencies, he said.
“They were arrested while they were making calls. All the callers knew that they were duping people by posing as representatives of Microsoft and other software majors. They had received extensive training and would pose as members of technical support teams of these software companies. The callers would tell the victims that they were under a virus attack and would offer to repair the operating systems for a small fee,” said the officer.
The employees would then send in a link. Once the victim clicked on the link, the caller got remote access to their computer and would scam them by making transactions from their e-wallets and accounts without their knowledge, the officer said.
A 23-year-old “director and partner” of the call centre, Mohammed Altaf Hussain, who hails from Mehdi Street near central Kolkata’s Taltala, is one of the arrested, the officer said. The 27 were produced at a Salt Lake court. Five, including Hussain, were sent to police custody for five days. The rest were sent to jail custody for 14 days.
Salt Lake police have started a crackdown on dubious call centres. In the past couple of months, at least five call centres that had allegedly been involved in duping people using similar tactics have been shut down.